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Originally Posted by andy_m
It would appear that Bt set out to be Sky Sports and ended up being ESPN, and its cost them a hell of a lot more than it should have done to get to that position. Like Muppetman said, we're in the realms of guess work at the minute, but I should imagine there is still plenty of scope for Virgin to get this new channel on good terms at this moment in time.
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I just can't see BT sports being a roaring success. As you've stated Andy it looks like it's going to be ESPN with a new name.
People who will be interested in BT Sports would have probably had either Setanta Sports or ESPN previously. If BT try to price the channel higher than £10.00 per month, they'll just anger sports fans and will find it hard to attract customers.
Even if BT offer the channel for free on their own platform, and come up with competitive bundles, how many satisfied SKY and Virgin customers would actually join BT just to get a free sports channel? I think both SKY and Virgin customers would lose more than they gain by joining BT.
Spiderplant posted some really interesting results last week. In quarter 2 of 2007 Virgin had 3,396,600 TV customers. In July 2007 Virgin added Setanta Sports 1, Setanta Sports 2, Setanta Golf, Racing UK, Celtic TV, Rangers TV and a few months later Setanta Sports News. This was a ground breaking deal, never seen before in the UK, and was marketed aggressively by Virgin. So after 12 month how many new TV customers did Virgin attract with the added lure of free premium sports? Well according to figures provided by Spiderplant it was 179,900, much lower than I'd expected.
Setanta Sports peaked at 1.3 million subscribers over all platforms with a better portfolio of sport than ESPN ever achieved and what BT Sports will have from launch. I just can't see BT making a massive success of this opportunity. Virgin had more to offer in terms of TV content, bundles and packages when they agreed the unique deal with Setanta and pulled in a gross of 179,900 new customers. How can BT do better than this?
BT investors are already worried about how things are progressing. Maybe the investors are scratching their head too trying to understand when they will see a return. Basically BT, like ESPN before them, have 4 years to make this a success. There will come a point where investors demand money stops being thrown at content if uptake is slow.